It's 2024 - people still use Windows? Why?

Walk down any town in Ireland and you'll come across a "turf accountant." Sports betting in Ireland is everywhere. Same in the UK.

I grew up in the US and was there till my late 20s leaving in 1998. But even when I go back, sports betting there is nothing like here.

If anything, the US hides sports betting and has an unhealthy underground relationship with it. Put it out in the open and be honest about it.

Come on folks. The rest of the world has had sports gambling for years and trundles along just fine.

You'll all survive.

It's not different. Apple and other tech companies have demanded that law enforcement ***get a warrant***. Get that - a warrant that is specific and limited in what it requests - and they'll hand over data.

But openly or secretively ordering tech companies to hand over data or trying to get warrants that allow law enforcement to look through loads of other peoples' data is resisted - and rightfully so.

Why? What's so special about states? They're just lines on a map.

How much profit can you make off a kindergartner?

I did work for Google and have since retired. So point not invalid.

As someone who has interviewed nearly 200 people to do work like mine, I'm very much aware how rare my skills are. And I'm also aware how many CVs and phone screens happened before I saw those people. So no, not confirmation bias.

I'm also aware that it's not a huge amount of work to acquire those skills. Particularly now with loads of free resources one can use to learn more. Invest a little money and you could have your own rpi kubernetes cluster for a few hundred bucks. You can run hadoop or spark or hbase or mesos on a cloud provider. Learn ansible, prometheus, go, python or loads of other things in your browser. You can show off your skills outside your job on github or bitbucket and contribute to loads of projects to build up a real, viewable CV.

There are companies out there that value their engineering staff. For starters, they're usually not calling them "IT staff." You should look for those companies. You should also look at the job you do. Is it worth what they pay you? If you ran the company, would you keep that position? If either answer is no, go find a company where both those answers are yes - and your career will be the better for it.

You're working in a change-averse industry - your skills will ossify.

I've been hearing about H1-B visa issues on slashdot since I joined and my uid is 5000. And quite honestly, I've never understood it. If you keep up your skills and progress beyond basic tech support or other low-level paper-pushing jobs this is never an issue.

In my experience, people with H1-B visas fill one of two scenarios: needs and costs.

The first is where a company needs more staff because they are always hiring. This would be like a Google or Facebook where they need smart, capable staff and can't find enough of them. Even with H1-Bs they can't. So there's no threat to "native" workers.

The second is to replace low-skilled staff with cheaper workers. And yeah, I get that sucks. But the solution is to learn more skills so you can get the first type of job.

I'm a 45 year old developer. I've learned more programming languages post-college than I learned in college. I've taken courses on managing development teams. I've read tons of books on various aspects of tech. I have skills that are useful and hard to find.

That's the answer - and it's actually part of the point Hillary Clinton was making.

OpenSSL did not come from OpenBSD. So right from the start your theory is broken.

It's a great question.

The answer to the question is to update your CV, go apply for some jobs and take one of them. Because right now you work for an asshole.

Designs are great but they need to be built with actual, physical materials. Those materials will be supplied by someone.

Every single large nuclear plant to date has been built and run by large corporations.

Nukes are theoretically safe and efficient. As I understand it, there's not enough known uranium sources on Earth to power the world, but in conjunction with solar, wind, hydro and bio-fuels (preferably from waste) there's enough.

Unfortunately, theories don't build nuke plants. Corporations do. And we can't manage to regulate large retail stores to make them behave in a socially responsible way, why do we think we can regulate a giant power company? Japan generally comes across as a competent, long-term thinking country. And yet even their political culture couldn't prevent fraud and corruption in the building of their nuke plants.

Until our political systems can effectively regulate large corporations, I'm opposed to nuclear power. The theory's great, but so far I don't see designs that can survive large-scale corruption.

MAC addresses are useless for tracking pretty much anything except on a LAN (and even then they're pretty useless - particularly with virtual machines becoming more prevalent). In addition MAC address info ages out insanely quickly. Half the MAC addresses in my house post-date the street view car passing. And in fact several others aren't here.

ESSID info is useful for geolocation, but even it rapidly ages. And Google is hardly the only company that sniffs that.

And Microsoft applications bleed private info far more sensitive than MAC addresses. I once got a job offer as a Word document which also contained job offers for four other people. Some versions of Word and Excel save random bits of RAM into docs. Honestly if you're using Microsoft products and expect to have any privacy you're an idiot.